The dot was down again this weekend as many of you had noticed,
and while I myself was blissfully enjoying Halifax. This time it was the result of somebody exploiting a security hole in our apache configuration and DoS'ing us in the process. We've closed up the problem, and hopefully we will go forward with our plans to provide better availability in the future. In worse news, master.kde.org, one of the key KDE servers that handles mail, mailing lists, KDE FTP, several websites, and some other duties has been unreachable for some time now -- word on the street is that the machine has suffered a big harddrive crash over at Uni-Tuebingen. As a result of this, primary KDE communications have been cut, packagers can't upload the binary packages for KDE 2.2, and inevitably the KDE 2.2 official release has been delayed. Hang in there folks, hardworking KDE people are busy migrating essential services over to other servers. In more fun news, Newsforge is running some interesting coverage of the Linux/KDE deployment by the City of Largo, Florida, that we featured on the dot some time ago. (as seen on Slashdot)
Other tidbits that may be of interest: KMonop has now been renamed to Atlantik, and Otter wrote in with the good news that kde.themes.org is not dead but simply undergoing a big upgrade. Get ready to submit those KDE2 themes!

Huh? I keep mosfet.org updated with the latest Liquid version. As for repeating things here I wasn't the one to make the original post... but I can't help it if people like Liquid ;-) I use my own account when posting here, even when flaming people :P

As for the RAID, I'm sure that the KDE folks know enough about servers (!) to understand the issues. Since KDE doesn't run on RAID, the money must not be there. Perhaps now IBM or someone else could be talked into a donation though. It would be for a good cause...

OpenBSD has a lot going for it but is hardly a magic security tonic. It is secure by default because it runs the absolute minimum and what it does run by default has been pretty well tested. Add an application that is open to a DoS attack for whatever reason, and as far as that goes it becomes pretty irrelevant what type of unix you're running on--it just plain won't work if exploited. If OpenBSD user don't realise this, it's secure default install probably does as much harm as good. Sysadmins being put under the impression that they don't have to worry about security is a bad thing.. we're a lazy enough group as is.

thanx 4 the link - never would have looked anywhere else when it is not officially announced/available on kde.org! now: in what order do I install them? I go into console mode and with yast1 first qt, then kdelibs, then all the rest at once?

I have an Athlon 900 with 768MB RAM and two Debian installations: A Libranet/Woody mix as the stable one and Sid for fun. I've compiled KDE 2.2 myself on the stable system, and the one is Sid seems a lot more responsive.

Konsole, Kate and KControl open instantly, Koqnueror takes less than two seconds.

Wow. I hope this speed trick makes it in to the regular KDE distro, it's pretty sweet.

Hey, putting it in Debian Sid ought to give it the wide testing that was mentioned in th KC article.

Oh, way to go KDE team. 2.2 is simply outstanding. The depth of this environment is amazing.

Why do people write viruses for Outlook/Windows ? Why do they attack www.microsoft.com, www.amazon.com ? Because they are famous targets, and if successful, they will have a huge impact, sometimes even in the news.

So why did they attack the dot ? Think positive:-)

This also calls for more distributive hosting for the KDE sites/repositories, to make it survive this kind of attack...

Seems like the university of Bonn has taken over ftp.kde.org and they have the KDE 2.2 release online under ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/stable/2.2 I hope that their anoncvs-server is not slowed down to much because of this. ftp.us.kde.org and ftp.us.kde.org haven't mirrored it yet, did the path change on the server? http://bugs.kde.org is still down.

gcc 2.96. There are some issues with Mandrake 8 as far I remember, perhaps you need a new binutils or objprelink doesn't compile unter Mandrake 8 but someone made available a binary which he compiled under Mandrake 7 which also works unter Mandrake 8. Something like that, please search in the KDE mailing list-archive.

I'm going through the same cycle every year. I install latest Red Hat distribution (as long it's not .0 release) and feel great. I start to wonder how come I've been so fed up with it last year, but can't remember. And then few months pass, new KDE release comes along, I download all the packages for my distribution and I REMEMBER.

It's because there's always problems with installing new release of KDE on it. I can never just upgrade the damn thing. There's always some catch. And new packages always depend on things that are not a part of distribution and, what's really annoying, are not even part of updates that can be found on Red Hat's site.

Sadly this time is no different. I downloaded all stuff and discovered the following:

kdebase wants following libraries:
libvorbis.so
libcrypto.so
libssl.so.2
I have no idea why rpm didn't find first two, but last one simply doesn't exist. And I have no idea where I should get it. I know where it isn't and that's latest openssl updates found on RH's servers.

kdebindings-python wants python2.1. Fair enough. But you can't have it for RH. You only get (in powertools) 2.0 and there's no update either.

Similar thing for kdeaddons-noatun. You need SDL1.2.

And there's kdeadmin, which wants rpm 4.0.3. RH 7.1 ships with 4.0.2 and there are no updates of rpm on RH sites.

So, now I have KDE 2.2, which btw looks great, that I can't trust when it comes to security. That is if it doesn't core dumps because of missing library.

I know these packages are done on voluntary bases and I really do appreciate this. Thank you for your effort. If my post sounded to hard on the packager, I really do apologize. It's just difficult to go through the same frustration every time and I wrote it in hope that next time it would be better.

But nothing will make me happier than someone who can demonstrate that I'm just an idiot by pointing out those missing packages to me.

I have similar problems with a few previous releases, so I gave up. I suppose that packager has a messed RedHat instalation on his computer - in fact it should be a pure RedHat installation on a separate partition but I think that packager use the same system, which he use for everyday KDE development. Doesn't RedHat provide newest KDE packages ? It is RedHat's fault ...

Seriously, I think I did all that's reasonable. I d/l everything that could be even remotely useful from Red Hat directory on ftp.kde.org, I looked on RH 7.1 discs and searched for updates on Red Hat servers.

I could probably find at least some if not all software needed in form of rpm packages somewhere on the net, but I don't feel comfortable installing software from completely unknown (untrusted) sources.

As a note, I recompiled RPM-4.0.3 from the src.rpm . Also, some of these packages are in non-kde. Also: I used the RawHide packages in some cases. FInally: my login screen screwed up, I cannot configure it from the KDE control-center. I think I know what it is but i'll try tomorrow.

By the way, I feel the same way (even though I have lots of simpathies for the RedHat folks.

THANK YOU VERY MUCH TO THE KDE COMMUNITY.
This release is just miles away from any other desktop experience under Linux.

Cheers,
-- leo

PS: I had to install things in a certain order, I had to use --force many times and some times use "rpm -i" instead of "rpm -U". I know, you can compile, but I like rpms to keep track of dependencies an for clean uninstallations ...